Oxford Biomedica Share Discussion Threads

[harry s truman] 12/4/2024 10:10

It's far from clear Dom (imho) and if that regular seller is still with us, then did they really just have a day off yesterday?

Just to give the stuck record another airing, I think the 2023 results presentation (which, the way these things work, is really the first proper 2024 presentation) is the elephant in the room here.

We said that would be on us before we knew it and of course it's a fortnight on Monday now.

Put in other words, only 10 working days for OXB to announce something now if there is anything in my theory that they gave an unusually long notice of the results this year because they wanted to announce something before the presentation...

That aside, we have the obvious mismatch of what OXB have said they are going to present and what the covering analysts (and the market) think reality is.

Where does that leave us? Nobody knows yet.

6 weeks ago Stuart said that 2024 revenue will be £126m to £134m.

Perhaps more pertinent is that 2025 is indicated as better than £170m to £181m, which would be our record best ever year and unlike during covid we would not have 87% of our work in one customer contract.

What will happen? Who knows, but a fortnight will very quickly pass and then we have this quite odd situation where the company has stopped burning money on operations and is already looking at projections of next year's record earnings, whilst trading on a little more than a tenth of our 3 year high share price.

[dominiccummings] 12/4/2024 09:21

We still have a seller then!

[boadicea] 12/4/2024 09:09

Back down for now.
Any boost if we get one will probably be around mid-afternoon.

[gareth jones] 11/4/2024 18:55

Another building block from NICE. All helps and the more Kymriah is used the more acceptable it will become and the more revenue for OXB.

[harry s truman] 11/4/2024 18:52

As I recall (so there's your warning) it was approved back in 2018, but only in very specific circumstances. What PB has found there is that they now plan to treat with it routinely - as per this same story from a different site:-



As for was this the news that I thought OXB might be trying to time to get in before the results? No.

[takeiteasy] 11/4/2024 18:46

Harry, is that new news in terms of positive for the share price and not specifically expected right now i.e. might help the share price a little given how stuck we have been. Not seeing any numbers makes it hard to guage..

[harry s truman] 11/4/2024 18:42

Winner of today's observer badge award for spotting that one PB.

It all helps in this rolling snowball known as OXB's revenue.

Obviously more vector to be made, but as I'm sure you remember we have a royalty on sales for Kymriah, so every sale notches that up.

JD at the time said words to the effect that it's a very small percentage, but that a very small percentage of a very big number is still a lot of money.

[pharmaboy3] 11/4/2024 17:05

Good newsHTTps://www.precisionmedicineonline.com/regulatory-news-fda-approvals/nice-recommends-novartis-kymriah-pediatric-acute-lymphoblastic

[harry s truman] 11/4/2024 15:16

In fact I just read the comments and one says it's on a price to sales ratio of 153.

Remember my point that average CDMO is 5.5 and OXB is currently less than 2.

(Just for comparison).

[harry s truman] 11/4/2024 15:13

Funnily enough I was corresponding with my spirit guide about exactly this story yesterday.

If that company has been listed for 17 years and their latest figures are sales of £200,000 in the six months to the end of July and a £5.6m loss, then their main or underlying problem isn't the stock market is it?

Unfortunately all the media outlets do this to try to support any current running story, which is why you'll note the BBC "occasionally" linking some really unrelated things to climate change (to give one popular example).

[takeiteasy] 11/4/2024 14:54

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/04/10/london-markets-broken-closed-pharma-boss/not directly aimed at us - but many here can only have empathy I suspecthoping this time is 3rd time lucky to push above 120p barrier :)lot of patience needed here especially when you hold a fair few

[harry s truman] 11/4/2024 13:29

Today's volume was extremely unusual though PB, with only 4,000 shares traded by early afternoon (it has picked up now to 30k or something), but of late a normal day for OXB is something around 100k in the morning and the same again by close. That suggests to me that our forced seller is finished (for now) and that everybody else is sat on their hands waiting for the results.

Should be an interesting end to the month. Not the loss for 2023 and such (which we all of course know about already) but the forecast for 2024 and 2025.

By the nature of our work (how long it takes and end invoiced) even though the order book value increases all of the time, OXB will have a very good idea by the end of month 4 of the amount of work they will be able to complete and invoice for this year.

Yes exceptional things could happen both ways, but I'm guessing that Stuart will give a spread of figures for 2024 with something like 85% confidence and that those figures will be nothing like the broker consensus. What will happen then?

[pharmaboy3] 11/4/2024 13:04

Some traders / market makers leave silly buy/ sell prices on the books overnight. In the hope that some clown takes the bait.As day trading begins, then sensible folk ask/ put sensible prices.The gap narrows.

[steeplejack] 11/4/2024 10:56

The equity spread reflects the stocks liquidity.OXB is a thinly traded stock hence the relatively wide nominal spread .The ‘touch’ might narrow after an hour or two of trading as the MMs shuffle those spreads.SEAQ trading predominated when i was in the markets but the SETS system can only do so much.In the absence of a relatively liquid market (where there are active buyers and sellers who can be matched up)marketmakers will have to step in to facilitate trades especially those that exceed normal market size NMS.Fund managers are necessarily nervous of taking large positions in illiquid stocks unless they are running a specialist fund,they can suffer the ‘Hotel Calfornia’ conundrum ie you can check in anytime you want but you can never leave.Traders in the market will generally avail themselves of level 2 access so they can get a detailed view of what is going on behind the scenes,something close to a marketmakers birds eye view.

PS OXB must wonder why it pays handsome annual fees to be listed on the LSE when it attracts such little day to day investor interest and thats despite having heavyweights like Novo and entities like IMT as large shareholders.These sort of experiences are prompting the exodus to foreign listings and going private.

[harry s truman] 11/4/2024 10:26

I know a little bit about OXB, but next to nothing about how the market works.

I do know that OXB is a main market SETS stock and so supposedly not at the whim of the people who make the markets on less liquid / non-main market stocks. In other words it should just be what it is - i.e. no shenanigans.

A little used feature on the OXB website is the almost hidden link where you can see the LSE order book.

So, go to and above the chart click "today" rather than "history" which is the default. Once you click that then right at the bottom of the page is the order book depth which changes all the time.

OXB pay money for us to be able to see that, but I've honestly never found a use for knowing that say (as I type this) there's one order with 6,364 on the bid at 200p.

Go to the book viewer for the European exchanges

Type OXB in the box there, and you can toggle through CXE, DXE and so on seeing the same thing.

I realise this doesn't answer your question, but as I mentioned the other day - we are in this odd pre-results period now where we are all expecting big things on the 29th, but something may or may not happen before. That will be true for people who do this for a living too - it's an unclear / uncertain period.

[reddirish] 11/4/2024 09:59

I've puzzled the same question, with no answer...

[wooster4] 11/4/2024 08:19

would someone with more knowledge than me explain why the market always opens the price each day with a massive spread? Seems to take a couple of hours for that to narrow.

[harry s truman] 10/4/2024 16:22

It's also the season for filling ISAs.

[brucie5] 10/4/2024 16:20

Hope springs eternal. ;)
But if you are of a bullish persuasion and given to tea leaves take a look at the 200 WMA. This is more of an early signal than the SMA, suggesting breakout at about 2.15 level. In contrast the SMA gives about 2.60 as BO.
Beyond these points the chart shows a huge potential gap up to about £4.50; so I guess some may wish to be under starters orders before the April update.
Though of course that doesn't mean it can only go one way as recent history has shown. But we have been led to expect good news, I think; and a lot of bad news appears to be in the price.
I hold a full position.

[boadicea] 10/4/2024 15:41

So what just happened in the last 15 minutes to put the share price up a couple of pence with no reported trade.
A large buy perhaps with delayed reporting or a whiff of leak?
Will it last?

Ed: Now (15:48) up 4.5p Trying not to get over-excited!

[harry s truman] 09/4/2024 13:45

I think we are in limbo now Dom (or phoney war or whatever you want to call it) in this little period before the results presentation - and why should the pattern change?

OK, I have hopes that the long notice was so that something can happen before the presentation, but if it doesn't then nobody covering OXB is going to write a note based upon a guess, when OXB will give an hour long presentation with the full kitchen sink at the end of this month.

[dominiccummings] 09/4/2024 13:11

Same old then... up a bit, seller, down again.

[harry s truman] 08/4/2024 21:46

Johnson & Johnson’s Carvykti is the one mentioned by Plutonian the other day.

We already have that undisclosed deal with BMS.

Possibilities?

[marcusl2] 08/4/2024 21:36

FDA approves CAR-T therapies from J&J, Bristol Myers for earlier myeloma use

[harry s truman] 08/4/2024 16:30

I'm not going to pull you up for kicking the tyres. I'm sure a lot of us wish now that we had kicked the tyres when OXB told us (peak covid) that the AZ vaccine was 87% of our bioprocessing work (aka covid restrictions had the rest of our work at 13%). How much money would scepticism have saved us there over the company line that vaccine work should carry us until our normal work came back?

Hindsight aside though, it is what it is.

I would assume (unless they say otherwise) that the JPM presentation about spin-out was superseded by the interims statement "There will be no further spend on the product or on our own internal therapeutics portfolio post-H2 2023. We've already said that. We can confirm that today. That's already done.".

So you're correct that they said that they would spin-out and it was also Ravi's job to make that happen. The spinout never happened and Ravi no longer works for OXB. I suspect it's a very difficult market to sell trial drugs into (as Homology are likely to conclude regarding their pipeline very shortly). If the market booms and money comes back then I'm sure our pipeline will remain for sale, but to my mind the only really saleable trial drug is the one they already have clinical data on for PD. At the moment I don't think the money is there and spinning out anything this year would really surprise me.

If we are thinking about the same thing here (re payments) it relates to OXB's previous model of hybrid upfront, milestone / stage payments and sometimes even an equity stake. Nowadays our work is end weighted - simply paid for on completion, which is what I think Stuart meant and is more normal for CDMO.

Stage payments and such are great if the drug is a success and hits the milestones, but these days a simpler full payment on completion is better for all I think, though we still have lots of milestones attached to legacy contracts - which came as part of the deal and may or may not happen one day.

I think it's very difficult to pin that on a style of CEO.

JD was an accountant by trade who became head of a biotech drug discovery company which branched out into doing work for others. JD was the one who I think favoured the equity stake route (which is how we got our Orchard shares).

But if the company isn't an eventual success? Maybe a bigger / simpler one off payment is better on average - unless you are really good at picking winning partners?

Roch is a veterinary doctor who ran a huge pharmaceutical company. So a medic vs an accountant and a pharmaceutical company vs a drug discovery company. I think he only ever wanted to be interim CEO anyway - else he would still be our CEO.

Frank is a pharmacist, so again a scientist / medic who ran a successful CDMO company and knows how to do that.

My only point here is not better or worse for any of them, just that they have been different people from different backgrounds in the same role.

Stuart said some words when Frank first joined, to the effect that whilst the vaccine earnings had been a revelation to almost everyone from the old guard at OXB, it was a story Frank already knew well - and that is our direction / focus now (a very profitable CDMO business).

Think about it and we've moved from 28 programmes in September 2022 to 41 active client programmes in September 2023. How many will it be on the 29th of April 2024?